Hi friends and welcome to the papaya podcast.

I'm your hostess, Try and Hermostis, Sarah Nicole.

And each week I'm going to be dishing out some sweetness mixed in with some seeds of wisdom or something like that.

So get ready to get inspired, get candid, get real, because we are all in this digital

space together. All right, everyone, welcome back. This is an episode that I've sort of been

promising, wanting to do for a really long time. As many of you know, I was diagnosed with PMDD

about two years ago. And I only ever sought diagnosis after having some suspicions.

And then my naturopath suspected it.

Then my doctor confirmed it.

Then a second doctor confirmed it.

And yet every day on the internet, I'm still faced with people who don't believe it's real,

that believe it's made up, that believe it's just PMS being dramatic and all of those things that people

love to minimize when it comes to mental health and especially for women. It's so misunderstood.

And I'm a person that's been diagnosed with it. I am not an expert in it. And that's where

it gets extra

layered for me because people will often come for support and help. And I can't always be that

person because I'm still learning and understanding it myself. And as I've been learning it and

with the amount of stigma around it and with the misunderstanding around it, I've shared less

and less about PMDD because

it's been so hard to both work to heal and manage it and talk about it. So I'm bringing on an

expert today. I'm bringing on a PMDD practitioner. Jess Fleming is here. She is of the page,

her mood mentor, and she talks. And I've shared her post so many times around PMDD to try and help people understand what this is because it was something that I barely understood myself before walking down the path.

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